Opening Mexico

I wasn’t particularly in the market for a book about Mexico, but when I was in Blue Hill Books back in August I noticed that their small history section was about 90 percent composed of books I’d already read and enjoyed. So I figured I would trust their judgment and pick up Julia Preston and Sam Dillon’s Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy.
The authors were New York Times reporters in Mexico and as such the book lacks some of the theoretical sophistication you would expect from a historian. It’s also kind of poorly organized, at times taking detours into things that perhaps were important scoops at the time but don’t seem very historically significant. But they’ve taken the very complicated and multifaceted process of Mexican democratization and broken it down in a way that’s both detailed and readable. You come to appreciate that this is really one of the big under-heralded triumphs of our era. Mexico still has all kinds of problems, of course, but you’ve got a nation of 100 million people making a transition to democracy in a peaceful way.

Mexico’s government began a formal 90-day consultation process with the nation’s business community that’s needed before the start of talks to revise NAFTA and must be prepared for all scenarios, the country’s top diplomat said.

OTTAWA — The RCMP is investigating the finances of a tiny B.C. First Nation band used to enrich members of a single family to the tune of $4.2 million over 3½ years, according to a forensic audit obtained by Postmedia News.
The Shuswap First Nation’s transfers to the family, and payment for trips to Las Vegas and Cuba ended in November 2014, when the family was voted out of office after Postmedia’s disclosures.

Mexico City (AFP) - Mexico unveiled rules Thursday for the first phase of its historic opening of the oil sector to foreign investors, pledging transparent auctions in July for 14 shallow-water fields.

Johann Hari and Polly Toynbee have both called for help for ailing newspapers. Some new research suggests they might have a point.This paper (pdf) by Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido studied the impact of the closure of the Cincinatti Post at the end of 2007. And they found that: